Sometime during July of 1979, a Hollywood miracle happened. After three years of world-building and hammering out a screenplay, Jim Henson was given a budget of $15 million to create a high-fantasy film compromised completely of puppets. Accounting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $40 million to make what Henson described as a return to the scariness of the original Grimm Fairy Tales.

Another three years would pass before The Dark Crystal arrived in theaters on December 17, 1982. The trailer had promised a fantasy action-adventure from the creators of The Muppet Show. What audiences got instead was a dark and terrifying journey into a dying world. Critical reactions at the time were mixed, but the film grossed $40 million at the domestic box office ($106 million when adjusted for inflation), securing it as Henson’s second-highest-grossing film.

A technical marvel of achievement in film, The Dark Crystal merged cutting-edge puppetry and animatronics with old-fashioned special effects. Everything from animation and matte painted backgrounds, to forced perspective and miniatures were used to bring the world created by Henson, artist Brian Froud, and screenwriter David Odell to life.

To complement the film and help flesh out the world, Henson had a heavy hand in the supplemental materials. There was the novelization written by A.C.H. Smith and 'The World of The Dark Crystal' table book from the perspective of in-world archaeologists. But the deep lore didn’t stop there. There is also a four-book prequel novel series published from 2016-2019, and the 12-issue comic published in 2017 based on the never-produced film sequel to The Dark Crystal. Combined, these texts form the bedrock upon which the Netflix series is built.

But who has time to read all of that before The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance drops this weekend? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Where Are We?

One thing that stood out to me upon rewatching The Dark Crystal for this article was how little hand-holding the narrative gives the audience.

Voice-over narration begins,

"Another world, Another time. In the Age of Wonder. A thousand years ago, this land was green and good, until the Crystal cracked. For a single piece was lost; a shard of the Crystal. Then strife began, and two new races appeared: the cruel Skeksis... the gentle Mystics.”

The Dark Crystal hits the ground running and you either keep up or get left behind. As the film goes on, very little is mentioned about the world itself. The audience knows it has a variety of biomes, ranging from mountains and swamps to meadows and deserts. The creatures and landscape project enough alienness to make further detail unnecessary.

However, outside the confines of the film, the planet is known as Thra. Positioned in an unknown portion of space, Thra is hypothesized to be a flat, triangular planet. Thousands of years ago, The Great Crystal sat within a mountain at the heart of Thra. Somehow on a molecular level, the Crystal (and therefore the planet) could be felt by every creature on the planet. But wait, there’s more. In the misty past of Thra, the planet became depressed that it could not communicate. As a solution, Thra created Aughra to be its voice. The ancient, perhaps one-of-a-kind creature taught the Gelflings how to survive and thrive in the face of many of dangers.

It wasn’t until much later that the mountain was razed and the Crystal Palace built to encase the Crystal. Whether or not the Crystal could still commune with the denizens of Thra while it was incomplete remains unknown.

These Puppet Elves Are Unsettlingly Attractive

By the time the plot of The Dark Crystal begins, the dominant native species known as the Gelflings have been nearly wiped off the face of Thra. Only the main characters -- Jyn and Kira -- remain (to our knowledge). Raised by other sentient species, neither young Gelfing is knowledgeable about their people’s customs, histories, or civilization. Kira knows a little about the communal sharing of memories known as dream-fasting, but Jyn is so ignorant of his own species that he is shocked to discover Kira, like all female Gelfings, has wings.

In order to save the world from eternal rule by the evil Skeksis, it wasn’t necessary for the Gelfling heroes to take a detour through lore town. But that doesn’t mean Jim Henson didn’t write it. Since this is merely an overview and not a dissertation on Gelfling politics, here’s a quick and dirty trip through two thousand years of Thranian history:

The true origins of the Gelfling are lost to time but, as stated earlier, they first rose to prominence as a primitive society long before the Great Crystal was shattered. When the urSkek arrived after a thousand years of peace, they claimed to be benevolent god-like saviors. Naive and trusting, the Gelflings became more and more reliant on the urSkek over the centuries as the aliens (hold that thought) shared their knowledge. With the help of the urSkek, Gelflings splintered from the other sentient race of Thra -- the Podlings -- and left nature behind. A great civilization rose and Gelflings populated nearly every corner of the planet.

When the Great Division shattered the peace and the Great Crystal, the Gelflings at first made friends with the new Skeksis. It wasn’t until decades later, as they Skeksis began to age and decay, that relations soured and war tore the realm apart. Concerned about Skeksis behavior, 49 Gelflings dreamfasted to create The Wall prophecy that Jyn and Kira find in the ruins. Prophecizing that Gelfling hands would destroy the Skeksis terrified the vulture-like creatures, who then proceeded to commit genocide. Outmatched by Skeksis technology and peaceful by nature, the Gelflings never stood a chance though clearly, pockets of resistance did pop up.

Three-For-One Special on Ancient Aliens

The main story of The Dark Crystal focuses on the hero’s journey of Jyn and Kira as they fight to save the world but their story is pushed forward by two other species: the evil Skeksis and the benign Mystics. As the tale unfolds, it becomes clear the two races are intimately connected. This culminates with the two becoming one again during the climax, revealing they were once a single species known as the urSkek. After thanking Jyn and resurrecting Kira, the ethereal beings beam themselves back to space and the credits roll. Turns out they were aliens the entire time. Yes, really.

Remember earlier when I said the Great Crystal used to be deep inside a mountain that got destroyed? That was the urSkek. Banished from their homeworld for unknown crimes against their own Great Crystal, 18 urSkek were sent to Thra via their beam technology. Somehow the Crystals were connected, but let’s not pull that thread for that way lay lore madness. The point being the urSkek were told they could return to their homeworld when, and only when, they mastered their dark tendencies. For a thousand years, they ruled Thra, building Aughra’s observatory to calculate when they could return home. Then, at the moment of triumph, something went wrong. Instead of beaming home, the Great Crystal cracked and with it, the urSkek were sundered into two new species: Skeksis and Mystic.

From there, it was all downhill. The Skeksis immediately turned on the Mystics, killing two of them before realizing they were connected. Now down to 16 members apiece, the Mystics disappeared into the desert while the Skeksis remained in the castle. Over the next millennia, the Skeksis would spread rumors that the Mystics were evil wizards who ate Gelflings, a bit of propaganda that kept the true nature of the Great Division hidden. Why the Mystics allowed this slander, as well as their refusal to aid the Gelflings and Podlings as they were slaughtered, remains a mystery.

Determined to survive the thousand years before the next Great Conjunction, the Skeksis used their vast knowledge in twisted ways. They created the crab-like Garthim as a military force. They reconfigured the new Dark Crystal in order to drain the life essence from Gelflings. They tried to recreate their own crystals, a complete failure. However, the inert black stones would eventually make their way into Skeksis culture as part of the Trial of Stone. The Skeksis even forged unknown numbers of false shards and scattered them across the realm in the hopes of complicating any future saviors after learning about the prophecy.

But all of this happened over the course of a thousand years. A long, slow decline that leaves many questions for the Netflix show to answer. How much of the pre-established lore they choose to use is unknown but Jim Henson and his associates left a veritable smorgasbord of options to choose from.